WoW – More fun together!

Overhealing is OK

Last night Reversion joined another guild’s raid on his hunter to help them out. He’s done that a few times now with this group and they’re all nice people. Less progressed than the Crits and Giggles raids are, but working hard. Last night they were having trouble getting people, or getting the right balance, and I listened in on vent.

They decided to have one of their two shaman healers (they were running two shammies and a disc priest) switch to her druid, which she did good naturedly although expressing that she likes her shammie a lot more. After they downed Magmaw with that setup she stuck with the druid and they went to work on Omnitron.

I guess they had a little trouble with him; they spent a while analyzing what was going wrong and the druid said something about how “she was sure she’d done way too much overhealing”. I got Reversion to check his meters. She was at 27% overheals.

Druids of the world, that is not too much overhealing! I went back to a kill we did on Omnitron last month (I haven’t been raiding much so I don’t have anything more recent than that) and looked at our numbers.

31.8% overhealing and as a raid, we do darn good at stay out of bad stuff, our tanks aren’t squishy, they use their cooldowns. In a group struggling to get this boss on farm I’d expect to see more overhealing, honestly.

Broken down further, the actual numbers for our healers looked like

(I cheated. This fight is always really good for my numbers. It’s the same fight this other raid was talking about, after all!)

Might be hard to read, but I’ve got 28% overheals, the paladin has 27%, and the Holy priest as 24%. As a rule of thumb I’ve noticed druids and paladins top the overhealing meters this expansion. If you’re one of those two classes, don’t panic. When I was starting I was getting closer to 37% overhealing. As the raid gets better and you learn the fights, the overhealing drops.

(Note for numbers people: the reason our cumulative overhealing is a lot higher than our individual percentages is that we have a bear tank. Reversion’s mastery procs healing, and it usually inflates overhealing numbers a lot)

So why was the druid healer I eavesdropped on worried? Because she wasn’t really a druid healer; she was a shaman healer in a druid body. Shaman right now look at meters and see overhealing as bad. I won’t go into all the details there because I’m not a shaman expert at all. It’s important to remember when switching classes but not roles that more than just spell names change.

I’m guilty of that. When I paladin heal, I notice I’m better at triage healing than a lot of pure paladin healers; I can get a party up from low without losing people, and I’ve heard other paladins complain about that. But I’m terrible at using cooldowns. Druids have…. er….. Tranquility. And Natures’ Swiftness which I think I ditched the last time I redid my spec, it’s really useless. Paladins have Hands of Various Things, Divine Favor, Divine Other Thing, Shiny Big Angel Thing, Avenging Wrath….If I want to be half as good on my paladin as I am on my druid, I need to get better at using those. They’ve got a great toolset and I’m not working it right.

But anyway; if you switch to a druid and see overhealing, don’t panic. This is Working As Intended.

Blessed, I would say :) My wife won’t heal or tank for the life of her. She is a pure DPS. so I end up having healing classes (i love healing), and a few tank classes (ick!).

The guild I am in knows I refuse to heal “ancient” tanks (those who are in the pre-cata mentality). I actually consider that griefing (who in their right mind stacks STAM in Cata?), and won’t heal them.

Paladins should be in a fine place for triage healing now. The problem is that a lot of them are still stuck in the ‘I am a single target healer’ mentality from Wrath and can’t wrap their heads around topping anyone off but the tank. I rarely lose anyone unless they are exceptionally bad at moving out of stuff.

I took my undergeared pally into SFK and expected to have issues with the first boss. Nope. No problem at all. I was kind of amazed actually. Yes having Reversion tank was a big help, as were some pretty well geared dpsers, but I thought that was supposed to be a hard fight for paladins.

Potatoe, that’s probably part of it. However what I remember is the trouble paladins had getting people up after a Massacre. Er, strangle. Whatever it is. And I didn’t have much trouble at all. Might have been the group makeup of course!

In fact, you can also do a lot of overhealing as a shaman.
A big part of our raid healing tools are hots now, and many of these are passive. These hots often do a lot of overhealing. It’s not rare to have 50% overhealing on our main spell, Healing Rain.